Last month, I wrote a blog post where I talked about a game I was hacking Cortex Prime for. The concept is that the players are a group of social workers to paranormal entities. Making my own urban fantasy RPG to play with my friends has been a thought for a while, because games like Mage The Awakening don’t quite get the feeling that I was going for.
I got a decent set of rules together using the Cortex Codex, but the system didn’t quite look like what I wanted it to. In being tempted to just scrap the idea and run a Dresden Files Accelerated game, I came back to the Fate system.
I’ve run a lot of Fate since Core and Accelerated released. I ran a full campaign around the idea of steampunk characters facing off against mythical creatures. I like the dials and the aspects of Fate. And so, I’ve started writing up a combination of the lore and any mechanical changes to Fate Condensed that might be caused when I solidify the lore.
High Concept Setting Details
The players in this game will play social workers to paranormal folks and creatures. I see this involving tasks like bringing donor blood to vampires who choose not to prey on humans or babysitting werewolves during transformation time.
The game will be set in a smaller city, probably in the Rust Belt of the Midwest US. The idea comes from how many abandoned buildings sit vacant for years and years in the area and what might go on there in plain sight.
The organization the players will be employed by isn’t an official arm of any government, but I imagine there are contracts for them to perform services like “biological waste disposal” or “special animal control services”. Things that they technically do, but are covers for the real job. I imagine there are people working for the Organization who even believe that those services are the extent of what they do. The players belong to a special inner circle that know better.
As for why there’s secrecy around it, people see things that are “dangerous” as a threat and tend to go after them. I think that’s something that’s happened in the past and now the paranormal community is happy to fly under the radar lest the 21st century pitchforks arise.
I imagine that the big antagonists will be a law enforcement task force made of officers who know about the paranormal and view it as an existential threat to be exterminated. And so the players will have to maneuver around these officers as they try to provide the services to the creature of the week.
Right now, I’m working on solidifying more of the lore and designing how characters will be built, and whether changes to how character generation works under vanilla Fate Condensed are needed. As of this moment, I’m liking the standard skill list, though Lore might end up swapped for a more specific “magic” skill for those who use that.
I plan to post more here as I continue to work on this project, an NPC here or there, a discussion of what I think about a mechanic as I decide whether it will be what I stick with. For now, I’m just going to include the first stat block I’ve put together for a minion type enemy. This is a newer officer that might be dispatched by the Task Force when a smaller werewolf is expected to be changing, or some other happening that they expect to be a completely physical confrontation.
Special Response Squad Junior Officer
Aspect: Ask Questions Later
Skilled (+2) at: Shooting, Fighting
Bad (-2) at: Noticing subterfuge
Stress: 2 boxes
This work is based on Fate Condensed (found at http://www.faterpg.com), a product of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by PK Sullivan, Lara Turner, Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Richard Bellingham, Robert Hanz, Ryan Macklin, and Sophie Lagacé, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Featured Image is Abandoned Hospital by Darin Marshall used under CC BY-SA 2.0
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